The Evolution of the ODBMS Market

Genesis

When Objectivity, Inc. started in 1988, object-oriented software was still in the early stages, although Smalltalk had a strong following, and C++ was rapidly gaining ground in the telecom and engineering communities. After extensive market research, Objectivity's founders discovered a need for a database geared toward the mechanical and electronic design fields. I'm still amused that Objectivity/DB Release 1 had no discernible query feature, not even predicates in the scan and traversal iterators! That's because the first round of customers didn't need them.

We quickly figured out that priority features for Release 1 included being able to support standard C++ data structures and complex workgroup applications (which meant deciding whether to go distributed or stay with the drawbacks of central servers). I also wanted to make sure that we handled complex relationships as efficiently as possible; with our system, users could find entry points by name, then navigate to related objects or scan batches of data. They applied conditions after we'd returned the objects, rather than before. There was also support for primary keyed objects, using a hashing algorithm to place an object in a specific logical page. That's gone now, but it may come back in a more powerful form.

Launching Release 1

We were worried that the other ODBMS companies rushing to market at that time might "out- tech" us, but that proved not to be the case. Objectivity/DB Release 1 was robust, fully distributed and had more basic features, such as recovery, versioning, naming and relationship management, than its peers.

Four customers built new products based on Release 1 and three of them made it market with products based on Release 1.2, which introduced the Multi-reader, One-Writer concurrency model. The original customers were:

• Automation Technology Products (ATP, now Technology Answers,) with the Cimplex solid modeling, mechanical analysis and automatic numerical control program generation package.
• Valid Logic Systems (now part of Cadence), with a configuration management package for their ECAD packages.
• Matra Data Systems, with a satellite design management application.

The fourth, Sony Corporation, built a prototype product that combined a VCR and a TV games machine. They used Objectivity/DB to hold the game rules and a virtual world. Unfortunately, they'd already started work on the PlayStation and they abandoned the hybrid product as being too expensive.

Interestingly, we spent six months with a deliverable product before we actually made a public announcement about its availability. We let ATP and Valid Logic Systems announce their products at major shows before our first press release. The Quality Assurance paid off (and still does) and the fact that there were already other products out there took a little bit of the risk out of the equation for other evaluators.

Embedded Systems

We spent several years working primarily in the engineering world. Then Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) started selling Objectivity/DB as DEC ObjectDB, and we broadened our base. Objectivity/DB was embedded in process control equipment, eventually leading to a major deal with Fisher Rosemount. That relationship lives on under the wing of Emerson, in their Delta V range of products.

We also had our first successes in the burgeoning telecom equipment market, first with British Telecom and then with Digital Switch Corporation (now Alcatel). The telecom market developed faster than any other, but we also had a quiet start in the defense market (at Boeing) and in complex financial applications, with Citibank.

Very Large Databases

By the end of the century we were making most of our revenue from the embedded space, primarily telecom, but the Very Large Database market was starting to become significant for us. CERN selected Objectivity/DB for several major projects, including the prototype systems for the Large Hadron Collider. That lead to the highly successful BaBar project at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, where we were able to publicly announce that they had built a one-Petabyte database with Objectivity/DB.

Unlike most other large scientific projects, both then and now, they were using the ODBMS as the main repository and directly processing and querying the data. Most projects, including the current LHC project, use a database to index structured files. Their efforts brought Objectivity/DB to the attention of the intelligence and defense communities .

The combination of speed, proven scalability, reliability and cost savings in hardware and in software development effort made it very attractive for advanced projects and systems, which is where more than half of our revenue comes from today.

An Evolution

The lessons we learned from the workgroup, equipment and scientific applications have allowed us to improve Objectivity/DB and its appeal to a broader base of users. We still don't spend much time in conventional IT departments, but that's not our aim. More than 80 percent of the world's data isn't in any kind of structured database. Just about all of that data could be in Objectivity/DB.

By the way, we did add queries at Release 2, mainly in support of Objectivity/SQL++, but we didn't make any major enhancements to that feature until Release 9, with the introduction of the Parallel Query Engine.

Do you have feedback?

You're about to see another major query engine upgrade as a part of Release 10, which some of you have been Beta testing with us. We've also been thinking about Release 11 for a while, so now is a good time to tell us what you'd like to see in it.